Sapphire Pure CrossFire 3200 Review - PAGE 2

The Sapphire Pure CrossFire 3200 is yet another board to use the ATI RD580 chipset design, but for the AM2 platform. This is our first review of an AM2 RD580 board review, but we had encountered our first RD580 chipset back when we performed our review of the Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe Socket 939 motherboard. I was one of the two here who had the lucky opportunity to review that particular Asus board, and was more than impressed with the performance aspects of the RD580 chip set.

Also dubbed the Xpress 3200, the RD 580 was ATIs response to long time rival Nvidia. For some years now, the nForce chip set, in all its incarnations, has been the leader where it pertained to performance and over clocking. ATI just had to do something. Using TSMC's 110-nanometer manufacturing process, this north bridge handles a considerable amount of work, even given its rather small package. It's only 39 square millimeters in die area, while packed with just over 22 million transistors.

What does this all mean? Well, the Xpress 3200 chip set can, in some cases, attain HyperTransport and FSB speeds well above 1200 MHz, if not close to 1300 MHz if tweaked and cooled. Insane speeds are abound with the removal of the internal clock divisor from this chip. This allows for a synchronous speed between the north bridge and Hyper Transport speeds. I can't wait to fire up some of the gaming bench marks.

And speaking of gaming, the PCI-Express configuration make me smile. With a total of 40 lanes available, and 32 dedicated right off the bat to graphics (Dual 16x CrossFire anyone?), we have come to expect some serious frame rates when playing with the RD580. Even keeping in mind that Cabless CrossFire with even X1900GT cards do not have significant speed degradations with even dual 8X PCI-E (read our study of 8X vs 16X Cabless CrossFire X1900GT and X1800GTO articles for more details), future considerations should be taken into account for even higher performing cards.

Those 8 remaining PCI-E lanes have been split up even further. Four of them handle all of the I/O responsibilities, such as the USB, LAN, IEEE1394 and the such. The other four lanes chat with the ATI SB600, the little south bridge that closes the chip set loop. In the past, ATI had coupled their RD580 north bridge with the ULi M1575 south bridge. Kinda silly, considering that ULi is owned by Nvidia, ATIs biggest, and only real rival. This ATI original south bridge has really made ATI a top contender in the chip set market, and should keep them more than competitive for some years to come.